Kudos to CSPAN and YouTube, which brings us the words of Senate democrat “leader” Harry Reid from 2006.
Yup, Harry Reid is calling raising the federal limit to $ 9 trillion is the last thing we should do, because it will weaken the country, and hurt the economy.
Was Harry Reid telling the truth or engaging in hyper-partisan political demagoguery because there was a Republican in the White House at the time. Given his record, if Harry Reid was telling the truth, it was purely by accident.
“Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that “the buck stops here.” Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better. I therefore intend to oppose the effort to increase America’s debt limit.”
To be fair, that was what he said back in 2006, when he was a Senator from a fly over state with less than one year on the job. Perhaps he was just dangerously incompetent. On the other hand, there was a Republican in the White House back then, so perhaps he was just being the hyper-partisan political demagogue that he has proved himself to be time and time again. On the gripping hand, it probably is both.
The Washington Post had an article that brought up this quote in the context of the current debt limit debate. It said that Obama’s rhetoric then would be considered “a bit Tea Partyish” today. Spin the standard media bias out of that statement, and it is more than a “a bit.” The article also gives Obama an upside down Pinocchio for his current stance. In their rating scale, that is “A statement that represents a clear but unacknowledged “flip-flop” from a previously-held position.”
First off, there hasn’t been a federal budget passed since George W. Bush was President. Second, she’s an idiot. Let’s start a short list of stuff and can be easily cut and will benefit the American taxpayer.
The $2.2 billion Obamaphone program
Supplying arms and funding to known terrorist groups in Syria
The Department of Education
Obamacare
Fraud and Waste in the federal food stamps program
A Census Bureau report released on Tuesday reveals that the typical American family now earns less than it did in 1989. In 1989, median household income was $51,681 (in current dollars). In 2012, median household income was $51,017.
Poverty levels in 2012 also climbed to 46.5 million Americans–15% of the country–from 46.2 million in 2011. As Washington Post economics writer Neil Irwin put it, “This isn’t a lost decade for economic gains for Americans. It is a lost generation.”
That’s right. This is the direction our Dear Leader is taking us. He has prosperity stuck in reverse and is determined to stay the course.
The last Recession ended in mid-2009, but we are still waiting for the recovery that typically follows the end of a recession.
2) The unemployment rate dropped for the worst reason.Unemployment dropped to 7.3 percent in August. Huzzah? Sorry, but no.
There are two reasons the unemployment rate dropped. One is that people get jobs. Huzzah! The other is that people stop looking for jobs, and so they’re no longer counted as technically unemployed. That’s what happened here. The number show 312,000 people dropping out of the labor force. That’ll be revised, but if the truth is anywhere close, it’s horrible.
What Ezra Klein, the author of the article, doesn’t mention, is that this is the norm for the so-called “Obama recovery.” Every time our Dear Leader pivots to place his “laser like” focus on the economy, less Americans have jobs.
Either Barack Obama really isn’t that interested in creating a regulatory environment conductive to economic growth or he is massively incompetent and utterly unqualified for the office he currently holds.
What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz Samantha Power and Susan Rice and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.
What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove David Axelrod to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income – to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression. That’s what I’m opposed to. A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics. Now let me be clear – I suffer no illusions about Saddam Hussein Bashar Assad. He is a brutal man. A ruthless man. A man who butchers his own people to secure his own power. He has repeatedly defied UN resolutions, thwarted UN inspection teams, developed chemical and biological weapons, and coveted nuclear capacity. He’s a bad guy. The world, and the Iraqi Syrian people, would be better off without him.
But I also know that Saddam Assad poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States or to his neighbors, that the Iraqi Syrian economy is in shambles, that the Iraqi Syrian military a fraction of its former strength, and that in concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history.